My ASUGSVSummit 2016... Meets MyCmgr

This post details my ASUGSVSummit experience this year which was a little bit different from previous years. As an early user of Declara and fan of the event, I was asked to assist with some community management... I thought I would use some advice from the summit to detail my experiences and hope the call to action might help me make amends for what was a bit of a shaky #cmgr experience. 

Fortunately I found some "just in time" PD from the MyCmgr team as this weeks' #Cmgrhangout was on the topic of super user programs.

Effective Personalised Learning & Idea Transfer
During the ASUGSVSummit Bill Gates highlighted the need to focus on effective personalised learning solutions. I didn't get the greatest amount of value out of my formal education experiences, where things changed for me was when I enrolled in an Open University course.

However, I don't use a great deal of what I learned in my OU program today, but I do gain a lot from listening to educators, entrepreneurs and the #Cmgr community.

One way that I think that some of these learning experiences could be improved is with regard to the transfer of knowledge and ideas, and is an area that I feel that Declara is particularly well suited to deliver. 

Social business practices are still relatively new and, as someone who is making the transition from traditional sales to community management (and who has benefited from others sharing their experiences with me), I'm extremely keen to "pay it forward." My Community Management Resources Declara Collection includes the videos and articles that I have found particularly useful.

Communication, Co-Creation & Collaboration
I realised a while ago that I can struggle to articulate some of my ideas so, to a large extent, I've given up even trying. Instead I just go ahead and implement some of the ideas and run with any that get traction.

In the EdTech report that I researched a few years ago "Developing Relationships and Delivering Value" I explored what companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple do differently and appreciated the value of co-creating and collaborating with educators and users when assessing and implementing new ideas.

Being Responsible During Cringeworthy Implementation

So being an early adopter of Declara and a fan of the ASUGSVSummit and with some community management experience, I was asked if I would assist with onboarding speakers and attendees who would be at the event onto the Declara platform. What a fantastic opportunity and experience, thinks I!

Unfortunately where I am at with regard to my transition from sales to community management meant that I perhaps wasn't quite ready to welcome over 500 people into 200+ forums in the space of a week, and this is something I need to take responsibility for.

The Power of Personal Connections

One of the #Cmgrhangouts that had the biggest impact on me was on Scaling Personal Connections, and was something that Frank Gehry talked about during the ASU GSV Summit.

On Friday after the event I got some "Just in Time" PD as the CmgrHangout topic was on Super User Programs, which re-iterated the importance of developing relationships.

The potential that I can see in Declara is that it could be a game changer with conferences, edchats (and educators PD in general), facilitating more collaboration between educators and suppliers as well as with the transfer of ideas.

My limited experience has lead to a cringeworthy performance and I am hoping that some people from the Declara community, GSV attendees and speakers as well as people in my PLN might be able to help me out and explore the potential of this platform.

I sure hope that General Stanley McChrystal is right and that "Adaptable beats Efficient" and look forward to seeing you on Declara.

For more Tweets and image of the event please see ASUGSVSummit Images

Getting Social at the ASU GSV Summit

The 7th ASU GSV Summit starts tomorrow and, as with previous years, will bring together some of the most impactful people from diverse constituencies—entrepreneurs, business leaders, educators, policymakers, philanthropists, and university and district leaders—to create partnerships, explore solutions, and shape the future of learning.

This post is an update on some of the work that I was doing this time last year and includes exploring social business practices and highlighting the potential that I feel Declara has for various stakeholders in education (and in a number of ways). 

This basis of some of the ideas and projects I'm involved with includes some resources that may be of interest to attendees as it includes a Twitter list and some social media stats for the speakers, sponsors and presenting companies at this years ASU GSV Summit:

ASU GSV Summit Speaker Stats

I've also put together this Twitter list of ASU GSV Summit Speakers.

This kind of data is the same as I was exploring this time last year for another education conference, but for the same reason.

Suppliers, Social Business and Social Media
This time last year, as the #SatChat team were getting ready for their Connected Educator Day and I wondered if there should there be a Connected Supplier Day, as you can see from this post any findings were based on similar research with ISTE exhibitors:

ISTE Exhibitors 2015
ISTE Exhibitors 2015: Social Media Links
ISTE Exhibitors 2015: Twitter Stats

I was surprised to find that there were up to 30% of exhibitors who did not appear to be on social media (especially as I was told that 6 years ago that social media "came with the job today" if you wanted to be involved with EdTech).

With the ASU GSV Summit data, while the 1,189 Twitter accounts that I curated had a collective following of almost 66.5 million people, or that there are over 120 verified accounts and the presenters with the most followers is extremely impressive...

However, as there are a lot of accounts with few tweets, followers or general activity I think there is a lot that these stats can tell us about both the way that ideas roll out and the importance of the roll out process of technology and new ideas.

# of Followers	# of Accts
1-499	401
500-999	164
1000-1999	156
2000-4999	179
5000-5999	41
5000-9,999	98
10000-19999	67
20000-29000	24
30000-39999	14
40000-49999	11
50000-100000	23
100000+	41

Something that I will be exploring is the relationship between the CEOs account and the company account, as I feel there may be evidence in this kind of data to support of Brook Freedman's ideas around Evolving your sales process for a B2C2B World.

Will the data highlight ideas such as "If the CEO 'gets' the platform and can see the value in it, then it will get the support required to succeed internally, if not then adoption may be a challenge is another champion can't be found?

As well as assessing personal and business accounts I found the icons on company webpages interesting too. Out of 705 companies 147 had no icons or links to social media on their websites, with 542 with links to Twitter and 487 to Facebook.

What are we to make of the difference in use of social media amongst this group of forward thinking, tech savvy CEO's? What are the implications for getting traction with technology in other areas of education when the stats here differ so much?

One development from assessing all this data at ISTE last year and the ASU GSV Summit this year is that I hope to detail my experiences with social media and social business, the the hope being that it will help others to reskill because I 100% agree with the commentators who argue that cold calling is dead.

Needless to say that I'll be following the Viral Adoption of EdTech session tomorrow at 4pm PST with interest!

Something that I think can help with the viral adoption of technology in education is this...

Declara

This time last year I had just published my second post about Declara: A Declara-tion of Interdependence,  I've gone to great lengths to develop an independent voice on my blog and realise that when I write something like 14 posts about any particular company or platform that any impartiality may fly out the window.

The reason for this is because this platform that promises to "spark social knowledge" has continued to live up to expectations and to delight since I first found out about the platform.

As a self confessed grumpy laggard it's been an interesting journey for me to be an early user of this platform, my reasons for joining was because the pre-launch literature 100% mirrored my own learning experiences.

Today Declara is more relevant than ever as I have reskilled from sales to community management through social media and learning from the #cmgr community online... something which, through my Community Manager Resources Collection, I hope to "Pay it Forward," as anyone who takes the time to check out these articles will know about as much as I do on the topic.

This year the GSV Summit has sessions around "Collaboration being the next Disruptive Force for Innovation" and "Why can't we be Friends: Vendor Interoperability in Districts"

With these sessions in mind and with a collective following of 66.5 million followers and many shared contacts and users, you can't help wonder what would happen if we did indeed all collaborate and play nice... Here are a couple of examples based on my experiences:

#DigCitSummitUK: Twitter Reach and ROI 
How Helping a Competitor has been Beneficial

In my opinion, you'll be hard pressed to find a platform that's as well suited for this kind of collaboration and knowledge exchange than you will with Declara... and guess what? 

A couple of weeks ago I was informed that Declara had been commissioned by GSV to support the event and I was asked if I'd like to help out. What? Helping to support one of the EdTech events that I learn so much from on a platform that I'm a huge fan of and on a project that will help further develop my #Cmgr experience and skills? You bet ya!

Declara at the ASU GSV Summit

I will be sharing my experiences with reskilling from sales to community management, my research with how ideas roll out and some of the implications with the stats that I've curated as well as the potential that I see with Declara in education over the course of the conference on Declara and social media.